Of Philosophical Style—from Leibniz to Benjamin

Peter Fenves

This essay seeks to be nothing more than a commentary on threeconsecutive entries in Convolute N of Benjamin’s

Arcades Project

. Ofcourse, this convolute, which was, until recently, the only one translatedinto English, has served as the point of entrance and center of attrac-tion for a large number of readers—and with good reason: Nowhere elsedoes Benjamin discuss more directly the stakes of his massive study, andnowhere else, with the possible exception of Convolute K, with its depictionof the Copernican turn in historical intuition, does Benjamin more explicitlylayoutthepointsaroundwhichhispuzzlingventurerevolves.Entriesonthedialectical image, the idea of progress, and the meaning of Marx, all underthe promising title ‘‘Epistemological [

Erkenntnistheoretisches

], Theory ofProgress,’’ give Convolute N its characteristic momentum. The remarks onwhich this essay comments have almost nothing to do with such matters,however, except

e contrario

, for they momentarily interrupt a sequence ofentries in which the character of the image, the ﬁguration of progress, andthe thought of Marx are brought into line. Coming immediately after twosuggestive citations—one from a work on nineteenth-century French litera-

boundary 2

68 boundary 2 / Spring 2003

ture that compares certain ‘‘images’’ of the past to ‘‘those that are imprintedby light on a photosensitive plate,’’

1

the other from a poem by Victor Hugo,in which progress is represented as an ‘‘eternal reader’’ who ‘‘leans on itselbows and dreams’’ (N15a,2)—and coming immediately before an exten-sive engagement with Marx’s work, the entries I discuss are easily over-looked. Neither the passages Benjamin cites nor his own brief remarksseem especially profound, nor are they likely to strike readers as anythingmore than an incongruous plea for clarity. The topic toward which this com-mentary gravitates is the locus of this incongruity, one of the very few tech-nical terms of traditional philosophical discourse that Benjamin adopts forhis

Arcades Project

, as if it were the last word of—and his last word on—what is generally called ‘‘philosophy,’’ namely the technical term

monad

.

1. N15a,3, or ‘‘Du Style’’

BenjaminquotesthefollowingpassagefromJosephJoubert’seclec-tic treatise ‘‘Du Style’’:It is through familiar words [

mots familiers

] that style bites into andpenetratesthereader.Itisthroughthemthatgreatthoughtscirculateand are accepted as genuine, like gold or silver imprinted with a rec-ognized seal. They inspire conﬁdence in the person who uses themto make his thoughts more sensible [

sensible

]; for one recognizesby such usage of common language someone who knows life andthings,andwhokeepsintouchwiththeworld.Moreover,thesewordsmake for a frank style. They show the author has long nourished thethoughtorthefeelingexpressed,thathehasmadethemsomuchhisown, so much a matter of habit that, for him, common expressionssufﬁce to express ideas that have become natural to him after a longconception. In the end, what one says in this way will appear moretruthful; and clarity is something so characteristic of truth that it isoften confused with it. (N15a,3)To which Benjamin adds, ‘‘Nothing more subtle than the advice: be clear soas at least to appear true [

um wahr wenigstens zu erscheinen

]. Imparted

1. Walter Benjamin,

The Arcades Project

, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaugh-lin (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), N15a,1. Despite theremarkable achievement of Eiland and McLaughlin, which reiterates both the ﬂuency andthe hesitations of Benjamin’s text, all translations in this essay are my own. Subsequentreferences to

The Arcades Project

will be cited parenthetically by convolute.

Fenves / Of Philosophical Style 69

in this way, the advice to write simply, which usually harbors rancor, hasthe highest authority’’ (N15a,3). In light of the untroubled self-assurancethat Joubert both describes and manifests, which rises above those lowlyperspectives from which resentments are generated, Benjamin identiﬁes adesideratum wholly removed from the dynamics of competitive desire: thestyle for which to strive. With these words—‘‘On the style for which to strive[

Über den Stil, der zu erstreben ist

]’’—he introduces the three passagesfrom,andcommentaryon,Joubert’s‘‘DuStyle’’thatmaketheirwayinto

The Arcades Project

.The style for which to strive—by whom, however, Benjamin neversays—has a self-destructive structure: It erases itself

as

style, one styleamong others. Whatever else may be said of style, at least this much isclear: It implies a degree of contingency.

2

Either one style is chosen overanother, or a particular style is distinguishable from other possible ones.Scientiﬁc art-historical or literary scholarship, of course, may seek to dis-cover laws through which the contingency of style can be brought into orderalong the lines of Heinrich Wölfﬂin’s conception of

Stilentwicklung

(stylisticdevelopment), but this effort is a sure sign that style is at bottom a mat-

2. The relation of style to contingency is well articulated in the following entry from Con-volute S: ‘‘The idea of eternal return in [Nietzsche’s]

Zarathustra

is, according to its truenature, a stylization of the worldview that in Blanqui still allows its infernal traits to be rec-ognized. It is a stylization of existence down to the smallest fragments of its temporal pro-cession. Nevertheless,

Zarathustra

’s style disavows itself in the doctrine that it expounds’’(S8,3)—adoctrineaccordingtowhicheverythingnecessarilyreturnsandthereforeadoc-trine in which contingency has been fully extinguished. That

Zarathustra

is styled andstylizes existence means, however, that it ‘‘disavows’’ the doctrine it seeks to impart. Ofcourse, there are those who dispute the placement of style under the category of contin-gency, and yet even in these cases, a substitute for the term

style

is generally found. Anyinstructive example of this trend can be found in Roland Barthes’s

Writing Degree Zero

,which begins by identifying style with ‘‘Necessity’’ and proceeds to invent a new techni-cal term, ‘‘mode of writing,’’ which, aligned with choice and therefore contingency, coverswhat is often called ‘‘style’’; see Roland Barthes,

Writing Degree Zero, and Elements of Semiology

, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,1967), esp. 9–18. A comprehensive exposition of the topic ‘‘Benjamin and style,’’ to saynothing of Benjamin’s style, is outside the bounds of this small commentary. Some of hismost incisive remarks on style can be found in the compact formulations of ‘‘Gedankenund Stil,’’ in Walter Benjamin,

Gesammelte Schriften

, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and HermannSchweppenhäuser,7vol.(FrankfurtamMain:Suhrkamp,1972–91),6:202.Hereafter,thiswork is cited parenthetically as

GS

. For an analysis of Benjamin’s style, which takes itspoint of departure from this fragment and corresponds to the commentary I have under-taken here, see Samuel Weber, ‘‘Benjamin’s Writing Style,’’ in

Encyclopedia of Aesthetics

,ed. Michael Kelly, 4 vol. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1:261–64.

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